Clean water may be difficult to find in locations that are remote such as wilderness, in places that lack adequate infrastructure such as developing nations, and during emergencies such as natural disasters. On-site potable water production may be important for people ranging from recreational hikers to villagers in developing nations, and to organizations such as the United States military or non-profit humanitarian organizations. For example, the ability for military and non-profit missions to produce on-site water may prolong mission time, ease logistical burdens, increase mission flexibility, and/or reduce risks associated with overland and airlift supply chains. In addition, some locations may be so remote that the location cannot be reached by vehicle or boat, because the water is too heavy, and expensive to transport to the location.
Current water treatment systems may have several deficiencies relative to the operating conditions of varied and/or dynamic environments. Some water treatment systems may still be designed and configured for a relatively static environment, and therefore may not be able to adjust to rapidly changing conditions or variable water composition. It may take considerable time and/or skill to reconfigure a water treatment device from treating one primary contaminant such as a pathogenic microorganism to another, such as a heavy metal. To accommodate several kinds of water sources, some systems may become complex or build in overlapping modules that may make the system heavy and/or difficult to transport. Such systems may have a large number of moving parts and/or components that may make them difficult to service and/or repair, especially in a rural location. For example, a system driven by a pump may have a chemical treatment applicator that controls an amount and/or a rate of a treatment chemical added to water. This applicator may have difficulty adding a correct amount of the chemical treatment where a flow rate change due to such factors as the pump failing or one or more filters clogging, impeding water flow. Similarly, current systems may not balance treatment effectiveness with power consumption when power conservation may be important for locations of limited infrastructure.
On the other hand, small systems may provide only a limited number of people (e.g., one person or a few people) with a single mode of treatment that may limit the source water that they can consume. For example, a filtering system may eliminate harmful bacteria like but not be able to destroy toxins such as those produced by algal blooms. Chemical treatment systems that may otherwise destroy such toxins and be useful for a wide variety of other treatments may tend to be bulky due to added overhead in controlling the application of the chemical application and other systems to ensure effective water treatment.
As a result, people outside of functioning infrastructure or in locations may not have sufficient access to clean water. Treatment systems that cannot be easily and/or automatically adjusted to available water sources may put people at risk of dehydration or illness. For military and humanitarian operations, mission time may be reduced and water may have to be supplied using methods that are risky and/or resource-intensive.